Automating gentrification: Landlord technologies and housing justice organizing in New York City homes

Abstract

This paper focuses on surveillance technologies that New York City landlords have been installing in low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing over the last decade. It looks at how new forms of biometric and facial recognition-based landlord technology automate gentrification and carcerality, reproducing racist systems of recognition and displacement. We offer these systems a genealogy and geography, looking at intersections of zoning, gentrification, eviction, and policing that have historically solidified to dispossess and incarcerate tenants of color. Additionally, this paper addresses how and why New York City has emerged as the world’s epicenter of “landlord tech,” mapping out several decades of urban datafication that have rendered low-income, nonwhite majority housing complexes as laboratories for surveillance experimentations today. We observe how processes of “catching” tenants for lease violations automate a longer history of racist surveillance and property-making. Yet we also highlight tenant-led resistance that has successfully thwarted facial recognition deployment and that continues to organize for landlord tech abolition today. Through affective organizing, grounded relationality, and alliance-building, tenants have created vital abolitionist space and knowledge to curb landlord technologies and the carceral logics they encode.

Spicy red in Shrimp Town: Smart farming and settler colonialism in Guizhou province

“…Major news headlines throughout Guizhou paint a picture of an up-and-coming province pioneering the most forward thinking poverty alleviation schemes. Yet, poverty alleviation can also be synonymous with top-down control by the state when social service delivery is coupled with invasive surveillance and population containment (McElroy and Vergerio, 2022; Byler, 2021a; Eubanks, 2019; Jefferson, 2020; Maréchal, 2015). Guizhou is seen as an incubator for national-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rising talent, as a place to test young cadres’ ability to implement economic development in a predominantly ethnic minority region (Zhou, 2017).…”

FIRE Watchers: The Centrality of Surveillance (Studies) for Finance, Insurance, Real Estate

“…FIRE Watchers: The Centrality of Surveillance (Studies) for Finance, Insurance, Real Estate rental homes-and thus the renters living in them-held by private equity firms (Fields 2022;McElroy and Vergerio 2022).…”

DIS/POSSESSORY DATA POLITICS: From Tenant Screening to Anti‐Eviction Organizing

“…Aligned with these bodies of work, I have co‐launched a broader project affiliated with the AEMP—Landlord Tech Watch—which produces scholarship on surveillance technologies that landlords and property managers install in tenant housing to catch tenants for lease violations, increase rents and automate contexts of gentrification and carcerality (McElroy et al ., 2021; Landlord Tech Watch, 2022; McElroy and Vergerio, 2022). While much of our focus has been on biometric monitoring systems, CCTV systems, smart home systems and the so‐called ‘sharing economy’, we also position tenant screening in this space, given its role in automating private property enclosures, exclusions and expulsions through the data grab.…”

“…Open data projects are in this sense marked by liberal notions of transparency and techno‐elite data cultures. NYC's proptech industry, for instance, was built in part on open data incentives driven by the mayor's tech‐friendly administration (McElroy and Vergerio, 2022). As the HDC writes, ‘Amid New York's current housing crisis, “Big Data” is being used to spur a venture‐funded real‐estate tech industry that fuels predatory speculation and capitalizes on a racist history of disinvestment in the neighborhoods where people of color live.…”

“…One TSB reported having only performed 3,000 checks annually the year before 9/11, but 25,000 checks in the year that followed (Davis, 2002). Tech boom 2.0 and advances in cloud computing, software and automation, alongside the boom of the proptech industry following the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, led to the formation of further companies (McElroy and Vergerio, 2022). By 2020, there were an estimated 2,000 known companies (Kirchner and Goldstein, 2020)--CoreLogic, RentGrow, AppFolio, TransUnion and RealPage being some of the largest.…”